Columbus' evolution, decade by colorful decade

Thursday

Feb 9, 2012 at 12:01 AMFeb 10, 2012 at 2:06 PM

The future of Columbus, the state and the nation was anything but assured on Feb. 14, 1812, when the Ohio General Assembly passed a measure establishing the state's "permanent and temporary seats of government" on a timbered tract known locally as "Wolf Ridge."

The future of Columbus, the state and the nation was anything but assured on Feb. 14, 1812, when the Ohio General Assembly passed a measure establishing the state’s “permanent and temporary seats of government” on a timbered tract known locally as “Wolf Ridge.”

To the west, restive Indians were being courted by the British, who desperately wanted to reclaim the United States — a collection of colonies the Crown had lost in 1776.

The first lots in Columbus, along Broad and High streets, were sold on June 18, 1812 — the day the U.S. declared war on Great Britain.

Here and on the next page is a decade-by-decade look at events that helped shape the city, beginning with the conflict that threatened Columbus in its infancy (later dubbed the War of 1812).

1810s A tumultuous start

Although Columbus consisted of little more than lines on a map when the war began, Franklinton — across the Scioto River from what is now Downtown — was a major staging point for soldiers heading north and west to fight the British and their Indian allies.

In less than a month, British troops had invaded American soil, taking Fort Mackinac in Michigan on July 17 and Detroit on Aug. 16. In Franklinton, fearful citizens fortified the strongest village structure, the brick courthouse, and dug a defensive ditch around it.

As the war progressed and the tide turned in American favor, soldiers periodically amassed in Franklinton for battle, British prisoners were interred on an island in the middle of the river and Wyandot Indian leaders pledged support of the United States.

On the Columbus side of the river, a state prison was built in 1813, and its inmates were promptly put to work building the first Columbus statehouse and state offices at High and State streets.

By Feb. 15, 1815, a few months after the war, Columbus had grown so much that the legislature authorized Franklinton founder Lucas Sullivant to build a toll bridge connecting the villages.

1820s The rise of industry

With the war over and the Indians at peace, a growing Columbus began making products for local use and export.

Although business records from the city’s early years are spotty, William T. Martin wrote in History of Franklin County (1858): “The first successful manufacturing establishment, other than common mechanic shops, was the foundry and plow manufactory of Mr. (Joseph) Ridgway established in 1822.”

The factory, powered by a horse walking along a 30-foot diameter wheel, produced about 15 tons of Jethro Woods patent plow points a week from pig iron hauled by two-horse wagon from a Granville furnace.

1830s A new age of trade, travel

The arrival of the canal and the National Road ushered in “a new era of trade, travel, transportation and of material and social progress,” wrote Alfred E. Lee in The History of the City of Columbus (1892).

Previously, trails, toll roads (of often-dubious quality) and the river provided the only ways in and out of the city.

The Columbus feeder canal, linking the city to the state’s vast system of canalways, opened markets throughout Ohio and the Great Lakes region to Columbus merchants, farmers and manufacturers.

The National Road — paved with crushed stone from Baltimore, Md., to just east of St. Louis — became the nation’s first interstate highway.

“Commercially speaking,” Lee wrote, “it was a revolution.”

Today, Rt. 40 and I-70 follow much of the original route.

1840s An outside connection

Before the telegraph arrived in Columbus during the summer of 1847, news traveled at the speed of horse or boat.

The first telegraph line connected Columbus to Pittsburgh — which, in turn, was connected to Harrisburg, Pa., and the East Coast — enabling news to travel from Washington to Columbus in the blink of an eye.

1850s The development of railroads

Two railroads operated in Columbus in the 1850s: the iron-and-engine line linking the city to the rest of the country, and a secret fellowship of whites and blacks courageously violating state and federal laws to help escaped slaves gain freedom in Canada.

Trains arrived in Franklinton in 1850 and in Columbus a year later, connecting Franklinton southwest to Xenia and Columbus to Cleveland to the north. The early trains traveled at 25 mph, incredibly fast compared with the speed of a stagecoach or canal boat.

History doesn’t record when the first slaves were transported through Columbus via the Underground Railroad, but the General Assembly in 1804 outlawed such assistance to slaves.

With slavery being legal just 100 miles south of Columbus, across the Ohio River, several Underground Railroad routes passed through the city. In the years before the Civil War, many Columbus residents aided runaway slaves, sometimes concealing them in freight wagons.

1860s An upside to the Civil War

The Civil War brought incredible growth and prosperity to Columbus, with military contractors buying everything from horses to food in order to supply the armies fighting the Confederacy. Factories were built to produce clothing and munitions.

Military camps dotted the city, and a massive prisoner-of-war holding site, Camp Chase, was built 4 miles west of Downtown in what is now the Hilltop.

No battles were fought near Columbus, but the city briefly housed Gen. John Hunt Morgan, a raider who led 2,460 Confederate cavalrymen into Ohio before being captured on July 26, 1863.

Four months later, Morgan escaped from the Ohio Penitentiary to fight again for the South.

1870s The founding of Ohio State

Since 1870, when Ohio State University was little more than a desire, the institution of higher education has grown to become one of the city’s largest employers, and with a worldwide reputation.

In 1862, Congress granted federal land to each state to fund the creation of colleges to teach “ agriculture and the mechanic arts,” among other disciplines. After the Ohio legislature voted to accept the land grant, several counties bid for the school.

The $328,000 bid by Franklin County won — and on Oct. 13, 1870, trustees voted to buy the Neil Farm north of town for the college.

Today, Ohio State boasts nearly 57,000 undergraduate and graduate students on its 1,765-acre Columbus campus. The university has about 28,000 nonstudent employees and operates on a $5 billion annual budget.

1880s A record-setting gathering

Nearly 125 years ago, when Columbus had fewer than 90,000 residents, aging veterans of the Civil War held the largest-ever convention in Columbus — before or since.

Planning began during the spring of 1887 to provide lodging for the tens of thousands of veterans expected to attend the 22nd National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, as well as friends and relatives.

The planning committee received applications from more than 70,000 veterans and provided tents, eating halls, sanitary facilities and electricity at three camps for more than 55,000. As many as 150,000 friends and relatives accompanied the former soldiers to the event in late summer 1888. Railroads reportedly sold 250,000 tickets to Columbus.

To celebrate the event and impress the visitors, the city built 11 lighted arches over High Street — a feature that was revived in 2002, with 17 metal spans installed over High Street in the Short North Arts District.

1890s The roots of two hospitals

Not long before the turn of the century, two leading Columbus hospitals saw their first patients:

• Protestant Hospital opened on June 2, 1892, in a 15-room house at 3rd and Dennison avenues. It was the city’s fourth hospital but the first not associated with the Catholic Church. (Almost 70 years later, the hospital — now Riverside Methodist — would move to its current location on Olentangy River Road.)

• Children’s Hospital admitted its first patient, 6-year-old Lucile Metzell, on Feb. 3, 1894, with a diagnosis of hip-joint disease. (The hospital, now Nationwide Children’s, is finishing an

$840 million expansion project this year that is adding a hospital tower, a research building and parking garages.)

1900s The arrival of the automobile

Columbus Buggy Works, once one of the city’s largest employers, opened a new plant in 1904, even as the seeds of the company’s destruction were starting to appear on the city’s streets.

Campbell T. Chittenden drove the first automobile in Columbus — a Cleveland-built Winton — in September 1899. Perry Okey followed the next month with his home-built car.

Columbus Buggy, whose 1,200 people made 100 buggies a day in the 1900s, introduced an electric car in 1903 and a gasoline-powered one in 1907. Neither car gained traction, and the company went bankrupt in 1913.

1910s An anti-German sentiment

German products became unpopular in April 1917, after the United States entered World War I by declaring war on Germany.

German-language books were burned at Broad and High streets and in front of the statue of poet Frederick Schiller in German Village’s Schiller Park, which was renamed Washington Park.

Street names, too, were altered: Germania Street became Stewart Avenue, and Kaiser and Bismarck streets were erased from city maps.

1920s The arrival of air travel

Twenty-six years after the Wright brothers made their first flight, Port Columbus Airport opened, in the summer of 1929. About 3,000 people battled heavy rain to witness the historic event, with 100 airplanes flying into Columbus to join the celebration.

Port Columbus served as a transfer point on an innovative coast-to-coast route operated by Transcontinental Air Transport. With night flight not yet practical, travelers journeyed by air during the day and by rail at night. The first passengers took a train overnight from New York to new tracks at the airport, where they boarded planes at the TAT hangar for the daylight leg to Waynoka, Okla.

Although the first terminal still stands near the southeast corner of the airport complex, Port Columbus moved to its current location in 1958. Nowadays, more than 130 scheduled flights leave the airport daily for more than 30 destinations. Passenger train service in Columbus ended in 1979.

1930s Help from the government

With the nation mired in the Great Depression, the federal government employed 175,000 Ohioans through the Works Project Administration. They built roads, bridges and parks, taught literacy classes and painted murals.

Columbus artist Emerson C. Burkhart was in his late 20s when he was hired in 1933 to paint a mural at Central High School. The 70-foot long Music showcased singers and dancers.

Burkhart complained to The Dispatch that Principal Harold W. Emswiller ordered Works Project workers to paint over it in 1938 because it had too much “oomph.”

In 1997, as the Center of Science and Industry was preparing to renovate the long-closed school, the whitewashed mural was taken down and restored by Fort Hayes Arts and Academic High School. In 2004, it was installed at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, where it hangs above the entrance to Battelle Grand.

1940s The promise of prefab homes

Lustron Housing Corp., builder of prefabricated steel homes, was supposed to be a triple win for Columbus.

In 1947, the company took over half of the just-vacated Curtiss-Wright airplane plant at Port Columbus, providing jobs to hundreds of returning veterans and promising to help ease the housing shortage that plagued Columbus and the rest of the country.

Yet only 2,500 homes were built before the company, for a variety of logistical and economic reasons, went bankrupt in 1950.

Columbus controlled most of the water and sewer lines in Franklin County, so it defined service areas for suburbs and demanded that landowners outside those areas annex to Columbus to obtain the necessary services for development.

In the ensuing years, Columbus grew up to and around many of the suburbs, even extending into neighboring counties — from 40 square miles in 1950 to 91 in 1960, 144 in 1970 and 223 today.

The annexation policy is still credited for Columbus’ economic health.

1960s A neighborhood resurrection

German Village, home to immigrant workers in the mid-1800s, had become a blighted area a century later.

The area was known for boarded-up homes and overgrown lawns when Frank Fetch, considered the father of modern German Village, bought a home on Wall Street to renovate.

“Frank (who died in 1985) had the idea that there were other homes that people had taken upon themselves to restore, and we got together and got organized to see if we could do something to draw attention to the neighborhood,” William Lenkey told The Dispatch in 2010.

That fledgling organization evolved into the German Village Society, which organized a home tour to publicize the area.

Lenkey’s home on City Park Avenue was among the 10 showcased on the inaugural tour, in 1960.

Since then, the society says, more than 1,600 buildings have been restored, with the privately funded district added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

The village — with its quaint streets, shops and restaurants — remains one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions.

1970s The desegregation of schools

Although violence marked school-desegregation orders in many cities, Columbus parents peacefully accepted the start of court-ordered busing in 1979.

U.S. District Court Judge Robert Duncan ruled in 1977 that Columbus Board of Education practices for decades had “intentionally aggravated, rather than alleviated” racial separation in the schools by, for example, allowing white families whose children would otherwise attend black neighborhood schools to attend white schools.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Duncan’s order, and busing began in the fall of 1979. By 1985, the school district had been released from federal court control.

Busing coincided with — and helped fuel — a “white flight” to suburban school districts, but such an exodus already had begun. In 1969, Columbus schools had 110,000 students; by 1977, enrollment had plunged to 95,000; by 1985, to 67,000.

The school board continued busing for 10 more years before returning to neighborhood schools in 1996. By last year, enrollment had slipped below 50,000.

1980s A High Street emergence

In the early 1970s, High Street north of Downtown was derelict, known for its pawn shops, prostitutes, used-furniture stores, rough bars and storefront churches.

At the start of the 1980s, Sandy Wood, a man widely credited with turning the area around, started buying N. High Street buildings and redeveloping them. Wood has credited Battelle with getting the ball rolling by rejuvenating hundreds of Victorian Village properties the previous decade.

In a 1986 interview, Wood said he envisioned the Short North as “a tourist attraction and center of art in the Midwest.”

In 2012, the area houses an eclectic mix of galleries, restaurants and boutiques and is especially known for its bohemian, gay-friendly atmosphere and monthly Gallery Hop.

1990s A namesake’s milestone

The dream of a World’s Fair in Columbus to mark the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to America never materialized (Seville got that honor), but the city marked the event with an international flower show, a new Broad Street bridge and a replica of the Santa Maria.

The Oct. 11, 1991, christening of the full-scale replica of Columbus’ flagship on the Scioto River “began the debutante ball of Columbus,” said Columbus Mayor Dana G. Rinehart, referring to the yearlong activities planned as part of the quincentennial observance.

A greatly expanded Franklin Park Conservatory became the centerpiece of the AmeriFlora ’92 international flower show. The century-old greenhouse was expanded from 20,000 square feet to 70,000 and included nine climate zones for the display of a wide range of plants.

The Discovery Bridge on Broad Street opened with the firing of a cannon, symbolizing the gun on Columbus’ ship that was fired at the sight of land.

“This is the sixth time the Scioto River has been bridged,” Franklin County Engineer John Circle said at the June 20, 1992, dedication. “Three were removed by floods. I think we have it right this time.”

A generation later, all three improvements continue to serve city residents.

2000s A central-city revival

Redevelopment of the Downtown riverfront — from the Arena District through the central city to just west of the Brewery District — began in the 1990s, progressed during the first decade of the century and was completed last year with the opening of the Scioto Mile promenade and Bicentennial Park.

Public areas with pavilions, parks, bike paths and fountains now stretch from North Bank Park near the Arena District to Bicentennial Park to the south.

Developer Ron Pizzuti’s Miranova condominium project (at W. Main Street and the Scioto River) was an early component of the redevelopment — a 1990s project that turned a 4-acre industrial area into a high-end residential development.

Speaking at a Chamber of Commerce committee meeting in 1995, Pizzuti sketched out plans for a Downtown riverfront renaissance that would include homes, jobs, parks, sports facilities and cultural institutions.

In 2012, the Scioto Mile, Columbus Commons and dozens of private condo projects are repositioning Downtown for a new century.

gtebben@columbus.rr.com

Sources include: History of Franklin County by William T. Martin; Columbus, Ohio, by Jacob H. Studer; The History of the City of Columbus by Alfred E. Lee; Centennial History of Columbus and Franklin County, Ohio, by William Alexander Taylor; History of the City of Columbus by Osman Castle Hooper; Lucas Sullivant by the Franklin County Historical Society Sullivant Book Committee; Children’s Grows Up by Mary McGarey; ‘Made in Columbus’ Auto- mobiles by Richard E. Barrett; Creating a Vision: Riverside Methodist Hospitals 1891-1991 by J. Virgil Early; The Lustron Home by Thomas T. Fetters; and Dispatch archives.

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